SR’s editor compiled many thousands of notes for his books 'The Invisible Spirit' and 'The Broken Journey' on the life of Scotland between 1945 and 1999. Many of minor interest never found their way into print. For this daily series, he has rescued some of these abandoned scraps from the dustbin of history.

March 1973

Radio Clyde was awarded the franchise for the new independent local radio station for the Glasgow area, with Ian Chapman, managing director of Collins the publishers, as the chairman of the company. The backers included George Outram & Co (owners of the Glasgow Herald), Beaverbrook Newspapers (owners of the Scottish Daily Express), Scottish Television and Rangers Football Club. Chapman’s fellow directors were James Gordon (the station’s managing director), William Brown (MD of Scottish Television), Dick Mabon (Labour MP for Greenock), Kenneth McKellar (the singer), Ian Erskine-Orr (MD of the Greenock Telegraph), A J Murray (financial director of Clyde Fair International), Sir Iain Stewart (industrialist) and Professor Esmond Wright (representing George Outram & Co). Among the shareholders were Sean Connery and Jackie Stewart. Ian Chapman said that 'needle time' would account for 50% of the output, while James Gordon promised that the station would reflect the qualities of the people of Clydeside, which he identified as 'humour and aggressiveness'.

The superintendent, Robert Murdoch, and depute superintendent, John McMahon, of Larchgrove Assessment Centre, Glasgow, were suspended from duty after an independent inquiry ordered by Glasgow Corporation. The inquiry by Ronald Bennett QC found that the centre (for children who
would once have gone to approved school) operated an 'impersonal and
emotionally bleak regime' and recommended 'the elimination of unnecessary and pointless rituals'. The inquiry had heard damning evidence from Frank Carrigan, a supervision officer, that boys were punched and mishandled, that a highly disturbed boy was held down by four officers, that a boy admitted with a badly burned shoulder received no medical treatment for three days and that boys were not allowed to leave their beds at night to go to the toilet.